Virtual team leadership identity work

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the work-from-home movement, introducing COVID-induced virtual teams. The enforced nature of these teams posed new complexities and paradoxes that the team leader needed to address, thereby requiring new role descriptions as virtual team leaders. The aim was to theorise the identity work involved in reconstructing role identity when leaders transition to leading teams in COVID-induced virtual contexts, and how they respond to the paradoxical tensions posed by virtuality. Little empirical research is available on the role transition of leaders and the complexities and paradoxes that emerge when being necessitated to lead teams virtually due to an external crisis such as a global pandemic. A qualitative, constructivist grounded theory approach was used. Online interviews were conducted with 18 participants. The analytical strategies of a constructivist grounded theory approach and the Gioia methodology guided the data analysis process. The collaboration, productivity, role identity, technology, and work-life paradoxes introduced several role complexities for leaders of COVID-induced virtual teams. These role complexities were triggers for identity tensions as leaders needed to adjust their leadership roles to address the complexities and remain effective in their roles as leaders. The adaptive solutions that they used to claim their role as virtual leaders entailed the behavioural complexity between transactional and transformational practices. This study offers a novel view of role theory by proposing that roles are complex adaptive systems that respond to the paradoxes and complexities that emerge when teams shift to working remotely, resulting in the emergence of adapted leadership role behaviours. A grounded model was developed whereby the concept of complex adaptive agency is used to describe the identity work of leaders.